Shoggoth on the Roof wrote:Trixie is an interface for the player, not someone that the PC recognizes as a person that they're interacting with.

Then how can you talk to her?

She exists in the technical sense; She's classified as a person in the code and she occupies the grey abbey room, but narrative-wise she's more or less just the game's options and save/load menu, that's about all there is to it.

A little more fourth-wall-breaking than what a "Proper" options menu would look like, but that's the extent of her character in the context of the game. Originally, all she handled was savewords, so you could interpret her as the developer literally occupying the game space to explain the system to you as well as act as the node to respond to the player's saveword call. The cheat/options menu was added in later.

Remembering that this was part survival game, I think it'd be a great change to the game if the time of day meant more.

For starters, I'd like to see night time and underground combat inflict significant-to-crippling modifiers, since the city no longer has power to supporting lighting. This could be mitigated by feats that provide animal senses or effects or items that provide light. Some enemies might even provide their own light, such as the flaming lynx.

In addition, certain animals would be less powerful or even absent during parts of the day, such as the batcubus not being out during daytime.

Plant based morphs could perhaps lose some hunger while in the sunshine.

The whole thing could be great to extend to difficult terrain, weather... more environment to set the story within.

Gameplay effects for day and night beyond cosmetics would likely feel annoying/inconvenient, given how rapid the day and night cycles are in FS. We have a system in place to allow only certain monsters to be available during the day or night, but this is rarely used for this very reason.

I Do like the idea of weather, though. I only see a problem with pre-existing scenes referencing such in a way that would contradict a system. It's entirely possible the system might be explored in the future.

Blue Bishop, you're right that day and night would probably be too short in the current system of time. This, in turn, makes me curious about why 3 hours was chosen as the length of a time period.

Is this cast in stone?Would it make much difference if they were changed to 2 hour periods and rescue was slated for 20 days, seeing that both produce the same number of actual turns (240).Depending on how the coding is done, this would either make rewards and penalties to time more powerful or, if it's been done by 'time segments' awarded, produce no change in the number of turns.

Savriss wrote:Blue Bishop, you're right that day and night would probably be too short in the current system of time. This, in turn, makes me curious about why 3 hours was chosen as the length of a time period.

Is this cast in stone?Would it make much difference if they were changed to 2 hour periods and rescue was slated for 20 days, seeing that both produce the same number of actual turns (240).Depending on how the coding is done, this would either make rewards and penalties to time more powerful or, if it's been done by 'time segments' awarded, produce no change in the number of turns.

Nuku's selected the three-hour turn back when the game was first created, I think in part because it allowed the 30 days of game time to be broken down nicely into a reasonable amount of gameplay. As well, three hours makes sense for traveling across the city from one area to another, especially given the obstructions of circumventing monster groups, blocked streets, etc. Nuku's attempt at transferring the single player game onto the server for multiplayer had one-hour turns, but that project didn't get very far, so we can't know for certain how that would have turned out in the long run.

As for altering the turn length in the current game, I suspect that would be very messy to deal with. Aside from the more obvious cases of certain things being affected by the time of day (Down Under Pub's business hours, Alex's brunches, etc...), there's a lot of subtler stuff slipped into the dialog where NPC's tell you to come back in a day or are only looking for sex once a day, for example. We already have some things which check the time of day using the 'daytimer' definition, but several other timed things don't use that and would need to be tracked down and altered manually.

That being said, I'm all for more things making use of the day/night check, even if it's just in a cosmetic manner, though implementing vision/lighting penalties to combat would be tricky. For simplicity sake, we have to assume if the lighting's bad, then both the attacker and defender are equally penalized, the former in their ability to hit and the latter in their ability to dodge. That being said, the Snow Bat has a nighttime bonus in effect. While they are set to be nocturnal, it is possible to unlock the Snow Bat creature during the day and have him appear at that time. While the Fruit Bat is also nocturnal, their description (should someone make an event which specifically prompts one to appear) includes them wearing sunglasses during the day. The description for the rooms at the mall vary depending on day and night or if the power's back on. When entering the washroom area at the mall for the first time, you should get a short scene where a Wolverine Guard hands you a lantern to use down there.

Weather, while interesting, would throw off the thirst mechanic pretty quick. For simplicity and story sake, the game takes place during a fairly constant heat wave. While an event or two have been written in which it rains, the author'd never checked if this were okay, as they throw a wrench into stuff. What stops an industrious player from collecting huge amounts of rainwater, especially if they've got access to Dr. Matt's microwave to neutralize it? Should I ever get around to making a new version of the game from scratch, weather's something to consider, but making use of it during the current game would destroy the thirst mechanic.

To be honest, while I was writing for the fiction contest I butted heads with "realism" factors a lot. Clean water in a city in a heat wave is a serious freaking issue. Pumps and plumbing go down in dense population areas and it gets bad fast. See the Superdome during Katrina.

Likewise the population is a serious question. This is a fun, smutty game instead of a dark, realistic crapsack world, so we don't have the massive amount of murder and suicide that would be going on in a city where the trappings of civilization collapsed, (almost) everyone went rape-crazy, and no mass-death event emptied the zone of the overwhelming press of people normally present in any major city.

Don't take the above for complaints, I *like* things happy. And speaking of happy and game mechanics I wonder about Morale. Right now it's a secret stat that affects your crit chance. Aside from seeming like something that could be expanded a lot, it would be nice to have a way of tracking that stat. Perhaps a numeric value is a bit out of place, ("No doctor, I can tell you I am exactly 0.34 Seymours of sadness and singing Sunshine, Lollipops and Rainbows has diminished to providing an increas of only 23 milliLOLs.") but even a vague, "you are feelin' good, you are feelin' down, you are so depressed you feel like laying down and giving up," scale would help, especially if morale became a bigger deal. I mean, getting raped by a bear is depressing, it's part of what drove the Punisher to become what he is.

Oh my mistake, the bear was the one that got raped, same difference though.

Moving on to thoughts that don't involve fundamental game mechanics and the balancing act of changing them, I wonder if we can have more supply quests or more repeatable supply quests. Most play-throughs I find it pretty easy (by the mid to late game) for me to have a lot of excess food and water, and it makes sense to me that places where you are stuffing lots of "sanes" (the bunker, the police station) would increase the amount of supplies needed to keep everyone fed and watered.

boring7 wrote:Likewise the population is a serious question. .......and no mass-death event emptied the zone of the overwhelming press of people normally present in any major city.

Actually, that sort of did happen. I believe it came up in the Q&A blog, and I don't recall the exact numbers, but a significant portion of the population was de-existed (didn't survive the initial infection/outbreak and were broken down into base materials by nanites) on P-day. The young and the old didn't make it, as well as some portion of the healthy population.

There was a breakdown on survival rates if I recall correctly, but it's buried somewhere in the Q&A and I can't find it

boring7 wrote:Likewise the population is a serious question. .......and no mass-death event emptied the zone of the overwhelming press of people normally present in any major city.

Actually, that sort of did happen. I believe it came up in the Q&A blog, and I don't recall the exact numbers, but a significant portion of the population was de-existed (didn't survive the initial infection/outbreak and were broken down into base materials by nanites) on P-day. The young and the old didn't make it, as well as some portion of the healthy population.

There was a breakdown on survival rates if I recall correctly, but it's buried somewhere in the Q&A and I can't find it

Fair enough, that explains a number of things, and the other "population question" (e.g. the way huskies are poopin' out kids so fast that "flexible society" could never manage to balance population growth with feeding the little fuzzy buggers) doesn't come up for a few months.

Another thought sprang into my head while writing something else: A "skilled flyer" feat. Like the tail attack, boob smoosh (can't remember the names) and such it only works if you have wings and got that far in the main quest line. It makes traveling between nav points "free" in terms of travel time, because you can fly in a straight line to your destination.

Of course maybe that causes problems with how cooldowns/quest progress is tracked, or chafes against the "explore" command, I don't know. I am not savvy with teh codingz.

One could speculate that a prevalence of bodies floating around via rampant reproduction is kept in check by predators who aren't fond of scrounging for months-old cans of Spaghetti-O's, if you catch my drift. At the very least, you can imagine it'd slow things down.

Stripes and I have discussed making Morale a more robust mechanic, on the odd occasion. I do believe it's something we want to expand upon, but we've got a lot on our plate as it is -- especially for Stripes, who has to attend to commissions.

Right now, I've been more focused on making libido a more prevalent mechanic (Especially given the recent change I've made to libido gains/losses for player defeat/victory). Meanwhile, making morale more interesting is a delicate balancing act of doing such without also making it a nuisance on top of all the other survival elements, and as such it's a bit more involved than making libido more of a thing.

In terms of high bunker populations resulting in higher upkeep, I believe the general head canon is that a number of characters go out and scavenge for food when you're not around. It's not something that's really established in the game's prose or mechanics, which is certainly an issue (If it's not explicitly introduced in the world, it doesn't exist), but right now, in the meta-game of "Issue-triage", it's very low on the list.

In regards to your suggestion regarding flying. I certainly have mulled over the notion of a "Fast Travel", but I have nothing really conclusive in that department. As for flying itself, it presents a lot of narrative problems (If you can fly, why not just leave the city?). In most cases, infections with the ability to fly are described as not having been fully developed or that you lack the experience (Until the ending).

Isn't the nanite infection actively rewiring all the infected peoples' brains to make them more accepting of what's going on? As far as the reason that there isn't the expected level of mass hysteria, I mean.

Also, the thing about flying is that yes, it can allow you to travel more quickly between two points, but it also makes you a lot more visible to things like wyverns and gargoyles. Staying near the ground is going to be a lot safer much of the time. I would, however, expect it to give you an advantage when it comes time to make like Sir Robin.

A big monster like that on such a pointed roof... You may ask 'how does it stay up there, if it's so difficult?'